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ANSELM KIEFER

See also: Artwork by Anselm Kiefer at Art.com;  Contemporary/Postmodern Art

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(The following exhibition review was written by Brian Boucher and

authorized by him for publication in the Artchive.)

"Anselm Kiefer: Works on Paper, 1969-1993," Dec. 15, 1998-Mar. 21, 1999, at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10028.

Over the last three decades, Anselm Kiefer has become internationally celebrated
for imposing, operatic works dealing with the historical, mythological and literary
themes that animate post-war German culture. In 1995, the Metropolitan Museum
was able to acquire a group of 54 works from the artist's own collection, works that
have now been put on display for the first time. If nothing else, the show --
organized by Met curator Nan Rosenthal -- demonstrates the museum's
commitment to contemporary art, still a somewhat unfamiliar role for the institution
even after its stunning Lucian Freud retrospective several years ago.

The earliest works in the exhibition date from 1969, and include two depicting a tiny
figure -- Kiefer himself -- in a landscape making the sieg Heil salute. This image is
emblematic of what turns out to be a recurrent motif: his ambivalent relationship to
the German past; the jarring, somewhat goofy sense of humor with which he
confronts WWII taboos; and the use of barren landscapes to stage his dramas of
Germany past and present. The title of one of the works, Heroic Symbols, comes
from a 1943 National Socialist propaganda piece about the fine arts, lending to the
piece's bitter irony.

One of the most powerful pieces in the show, in which the emotional content is less
varnished, is the 1970 watercolor Winter Landscape. A disembodied female head,
superimposed against a grey sky, bleeds from a neck wound, staining the snow.
Kiefer allows the off-white of the paper to indicate the earth through sparingly
applied pigment. This understatement is characteristic of many of the works on
paper, in contrast to his often extensively worked paintings.

Several beautiful paintings from 1974-75 incorporate watercolor, gouache and

ballpoint pen; their rich blues and browns are based on his trip to Norway's North
Cape. These works explore the Norse myths that are a vital part of his vocabulary
and inspiration. One watercolor contains a portrait of Ernst Bloch, the philosopher
who believed that the potential for the future is latent in the present; this

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association imbues the land with a generative power that is bound up with the rich
pigments.

Another frequent icon in Kiefer's oeuvre is the palette, his pointedly pedestrian
symbol for the painter's enterprise. It appears in the 1976 Faith, Hope, Love, in
which three mythic trees, inscribed with the names of the three virtues, sprout from
a palette. Also present from the 1970s are Kiefer's works depicting the characters
of Wagner's four-opera cycle of the Nibelung.

The exhibition underlines the sillier side of an artist perhaps better known as a
sturm-und-drang Neo-Expressionist. In the 1980 Brünhilde Sleeps, a snapshot of a
sleeping Catherine Deneuve, taken off the screen in a movie theater, provides a
"very French, very slim, very sexy, very cool" alternative (in Kiefer's words) to
opera's archetypal "fat lady." With the same cool sense of humor, in the 1980
painted photograph Yggdrasil, the artist, bearing branches, wearing a borrowed
dress and a vacant expression, stands in as the trunk of the vast ash tree central to
medieval Norse poetry.

Two smaller works from the same period, principally in watercolor, combine darker
themes with lush visual presentations. Your Golden Hair, Margarete (1980) quotes
Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan's poem Death Fugue, which is set in a
concentration camp. Kiefer has sometimes depicted the German heroine's locks as
straw adhered to the canvas; in this work, they appear in watercolor as sheaves of
wheat in a field. In Broken Flowers and Grass (1979), Kiefer layers graphite pencil
slashes over a field of watercolor, gouache and acrylic. Rich, bright reds and
yellows are trampled by the broad, gestural strokes of graphite in another possible
metaphor for land violated by aggression.

The exhibition concludes with a selection of larger works from the 1980s and '90s
that treat Wagnerian and German historical themes. The remarkable graphic power
of Kiefer's work derives from the use of the same dramatic vistas and imposing
structures that characterized Nazi parade-ground architecture. His almost
primordial sense of texture, too, is represented here. Some works contain collaged
lead and shellac on paper; in others, he uses woodblock printing to cover large
expanses of paper or canvas, sometimes with repeated images, which he then
paints over with acrylic.

In the striking, black-and-white woodblock Brünnhilde/Grane (1982-83), printed

wood grain creates a riveting visual texture above a jarring profile view of the
emaciated horse Grane (the sacred steed ridden by Brünnhilde), which stands in a
flaming funeral pyre. To create a lineage for these distinctive works, the Met
borrowed from the National Gallery Albrecht Dürer's vast 1515 woodcut and
etching The Triumphal Arch of Maximilian, which hangs rather incongrously along
with Kiefer's works.

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The exhibition might have benefited from loans of a few more of Kiefer's large
scale works. As it is, adjacent to the entrance of the show the museum has
installed the large, impressive landscape, dotted with pink poppies, titled Bohemia
Lies By the Sea (1996). This heavily textured work -- made of oil, emulsion,
shellac, charcoal and powdered paint on burlap -- has the kind of tactile punch that
Kiefer is famous for, and in itself makes a visit to an exceptional show even more
worthwhile.

©1999 by Brian Boucher